God apparently did not have an opinion on the matter. Neither did the floor. But the smooth old boards were cool against my flushed cheek, so I stayed there anyway, working through the embarrassment and the guilt and the general fucked-up-ness of my life. Which you’d think I’d be used to after centuries of that sort of thing.
But I wasn’t.
Because I wasn’t supposed to remember.
I’d always blacked out during my little episodes. Always. I’d wake up, sometimes weeks or months later in different freaking countries, with no idea where I was or how I’d gotten there. Or what I’d done in the meantime.
And that was scary; that was bad. But I’d just discovered something worse: going along for the ride. Staying awake for the whole terrifying scene, knowing just how out of control I’d been, just how close I’d come—
I broke off, breathing hard.
One of the few things I’d always been able to say about my condition was that it was constant. I’d sometimes railed about that, about the fact that age hadn’t granted me any of the extra powers and privileges that it did the vamps. Years had passed, but my fits had never become the slightest bit less frequent, never the tiniest amount more controlled.
But then, they had never gotten worse, either.
Until now.
And the really scary part of it was that I had no one to ask, no way to find out what the hell was going on. Because nobody knew anything about dhampirs. And they didn’t want to know, since experimenting on something that could go ballistic and kill you at any moment wasn’t high on most people’s priority lists.
Healers had slammed doors in my face or cowered until I went away. Shysters had sold me the magical equivalent of snake oil and then run for the hills. The few unorthodox mages with enough cred for me to bother hunting them down had given up in disgust when their enchantments slid right off me. And nobody had really known what the hell they were doing anyway.
And that included other dhampirs.
Not that I’d met many, since we were a rare breed. And most of those I did stumble across either weren’t sane enough or hadn’t lived long enough to wonder why we were the way we were. The only exception had been some Indian guru-type I finally tracked down in the deserts of Rajasthan. He was also the only one I’d met who’d lasted as long as me—by meditating the rage away, or so he claimed. I’d sort of suspected that living hundreds of miles from any possible prey might have helped.
And yet he’d proven as useless as all the rest. He’d suggested that I learn meditation to improve my karma. And that I get the hell out of his territory before he ripped my head off and ruined his. He hadn’t offered any advice on how to solve my problem.
I stared at the dust bunnies under my bed and wondered if this was how it ended. If this was why I’d never met any really old dhampirs. If maybe we self-destructed, assuming we didn’t manage to check out early, like some kind of metaphysical time bomb.
I didn’t know. I’d always just assumed that I would follow the vampire example and go on living until I pissed off the wrong person. But maybe not. Because I was half human, too. And human aging had
all kinds of issues attached to it, didn’t it?
Like mental illnesses that got worse over time, for example.
Fear clawed at my belly, as all the elements of my worst nightmares rolled together into one. The sense of powerlessness I hated, of not being able to control what I did, who I hurt. The dread of becoming like the things I hunted, of seeing the horror on people’s faces as I destroyed everything they loved, needlessly, uselessly. The terror of descending into a cage of my own mind, shouting, begging to be let out, while something else took control.
And forced me to watch.
I shuddered hard and sat up, wrapping my arms around myself. I wanted to shove the thoughts away, but I couldn’t afford it. Not now. Not when I didn’t know what had caused this.
And not when it had happened twice now.
The first time had been during a fight six weeks ago. I’d been hit with a stunner designed to take out a platoon of war mages, which should have taken me out, too. But my alter ego is stronger and I guess it had decided that taking a nap right then might not be a great idea, since we probably wouldn’t have woken up.
My dhampir nature had been in control for only a few seconds, but that had been enough to allow us to fight through the spell. And to freak me the hell out. But then, seeing myself in full-on Hulk mode wasn’t anything like the strangest thing that happened that day. And afterward, I’d managed to shrug it off, putting it down to extreme stress, or luck, or desperation.
That theory had been reinforced when weeks passed and it hadn’t happened again. I’d filed it away as a one-off, just another weird thing in a life not entirely devoid of the bizarre. Only apparently not. Apparently my control had had less to do with a stable psyche and more to do with other things. Like Claire coming back.
Or like my new favorite beverage.
I could see it now, due to my never having understood the point of a bed skirt. The bottle was thick blue glass, bumpy and bubbly and almost opaque, like the kind that puddles at the bottom of stained-glass windows. It had rolled next to one of the foot posts at some point, leaving a little trail in the dust. I reached underneath and pulled it out, and some liquid sloshed against the side.
It didn’t look like much, clear as vodka without the tint provided by the bottle. And it tasted like even less, just vaguely of the flowers and herbs it was made from—if flowers and herbs were in the habit of tasting you back. And drinking you down. And standing you on your head because fey fauna might be scary, but I honestly thought fey flora gave it a run for its money.
But while the wine had a kick like an enraged hippo, it was also the only thing I’d found that helped to control my fits. Or no, that wasn’t exactly right. It didn’t help. Help was what human hooch, Mary Jane, and living with a powerful null had done for me. Help was giving me fewer episodes, or helping them to be shorter, or giving me more time to get away from innocent people who didn’t need to meet Hurricane Dory whenever I felt one coming on.
Fey wine didn’t do that. Fey wine turned them off, stopped them cold, shut them down. It was the magic elixir I’d been searching for most of my life, and it had seemed like a dream come true when I first discovered it earlier this summer.